Goldman Sachs fourth-quarter profits slide

Goldman Sachs will pay its employees almost £10bn in salary and bonuses even
as annual profits at the bank fell.

The best-known bank on Wall Street saw profits for 2010 decline to $8.4bn from $13.4bn in 2009, as revenues from trading bonds and commodities failed to match a stellar year in 2009. The fourth quarter of the year was particularly hard hit, with profits falling by 52pc to $2.4bn.

While the bank's $15.38bn pay and bonus pool was 5pc lower than in 2009, it's likely to fuel the debate raging in Britain over the role the City should play in the country's economic recovery. The compensation is the equivalent of Goldman paying its 35,700 staff the equivalent of $430,700 (£269,500).

Goldman has been working to counter a barrage of public criticism in the two years since the financial crisis. Last week the bank announced an overhaul of how it reports results, alongside what it said will be a greater focus on its clients.

"I’m hugely confident of their ability to make money one way or another,” Benjamin Wallace, an analyst at Grimes & Co. in Westborough, Massachusetts, which manages about $1 billion, told Bloomberg News.

Still, “the big trends which were a help in ‘09 certainly softened a lot in 2010” in trading, he added.